Synthetic Camp is real

Meet the seven companies shaping the future of Synthetic Media.

Evan and Harry from Latent Space Labs, white boarding under the watchful eye of some Superplastic Jankys

What does a world in which AI is our co-creator of media and our assistant in creativity, look like? How will we feel when the line between real and synthetic begins to blur?

We’ve been talking about Synthetic Reality and Synthetic Media for some time now at Betaworks and, in December, we put out a call for companies building around this emergent technology where the AI takes on part or all of the creation process. We were beginning to see both research and real-world examples of a certain type of AI, generative adversarial networks (GANs), being employed to create or manipulate images, audio, video and text and do so in increasingly realistic ways. Our call was for early-stage teams building in this space, inviting them to apply to join our Synthetic Camp program, an 11-week residency here at Betaworks.

Today, we announce the seven companies blazing the trail in this exciting area of frontier technology:

• Auxuman — Focused on making intelligent virtual beings. Their first creation “YONA” is an AI-driven singer-songwriter who makes records in collaboration with human producers, performs live and appears on social media.
• Comixify — Uses proprietary machine learning methods to turn videos or a set of photos into comics.
• Deeptrace — A cybersecurity company developing deep learning technologies to combat AI-synthetized audiovisual media, known as “deepfakes”.
• Dzomo — An AI-powered platform generating photorealistic images for marketers and content creators.
• Latent Space Labs — AI-powered creative tool for traditional 2D animation production.
• Radical — An AI-powered 3D animation solution that requires no hardware or coding knowledge.
• Resemble — Creates custom voices using proprietary deep learning models that can produce realistic speech synthesis.

Betaworks Ventures has made a $200,000 investment in each of these seven companies. The program will see Betaworks team members and invited experts work with the teams over the next 11 weeks to further the development of their products. Camp will culminate in a Demo Day on June 19th, when we look forward to showcasing the teams’ progress to potential investors and partners.

We’d like to thank Brex, creators of the first credit card for startups, and L’Oréal, the global beauty leader, for partnering with us as program sponsors.

Is this the real life? 🌀🌀🌀

Follow the latest Synthetic Camp news and announcements over on Twitter: @thebetacamp